Meredith Rogers, September 1978

Meredith Rogers, theatre director and academic, studied at the University of Melbourne and worked between 1974 and 1979 with Kiffy Rubbo at the Ewing and George Paton Galleries. She joined the innovative Mill Community Theatre as actor and general manager in 1979 and two years later she was a founding member of the Home Cooking Theatre Co., one of only two professional feminist theatre companies in Australia. At different times she acted, designed, directed and produced for the company; its Running Up a Dress, by Suzanne Spunner, was presented in the first Melbourne Festival season in 1986 and toured for several years. Rogers received the Ewa Czajor Memorial Award in 2002; in 2003 she directed and designed Breath by Breath, nominated for the Green Room Best Fringe Production award. In 2008 she co-curated and directed Cordelia: Mein Kind, described as ‘a duet for live body and film that maps a modern Cordelia and her "Lear-like father" onto the bones of Shakespeare's Lear and his silent daughter’ for the Dancehouse, Carlton and the Theatre J Incubator Season, Washington, USA. For more than a decade she has taught in the Theatre and Drama Program at La Trobe University, where her research interests include ‘the transformational relationship between actors and objects on stage’. Her essay “Arts Melbourne and the End of the Seventies: the ideology of the collective versus collective ideologies” was included in When You Think About Art what Do You Think?: The Ewing and George Paton Galleries 1971 – 2008, published in 2008

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2012
© Estate of Robert Rooney